[OpenWireless Tech] The police came to the AP owner first, then sniffed the air to find real culprit​

[Andy Green]

Hi -

Sure, if you're able to flat out run open APs more power to your elbow.

Most people sitting on a personal internet connection aren't in that situation and need something else to happen if they will participate.  In terms of reach, it's those guys that are all around us and could make a huge difference.

Calling normal people making rational decisions faced with legal facts in their locality 'cowards' as some are doing is not the right 'something else' to unstick them.  If people have a more convincing idea for those people than what's being discussed about vpn, I'm certainly interested to hear it.

-Andy

Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org> wrote:

>On Nov 26, 2012, at 8:22 PM, Andy Green (林安廸) <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
>
>> But you're right, it adds a hurdle compared to just sitting there
>with an unencrypted AP.  But for consumers, the truly open AP ship has
>sailed a while ago, they will no longer do it.
>
>I think that there may be some places left in this world where we could
>have truly open APs, but they are certainly few and far between. 
>Nevertheless, I'm not willing to give up on that possibility.
>
>OTOH, I do think that the majority of people will either refuse to run
>an OpenWireless site at all, or they will insist that it allow only
>VPN-secured connections.  These people might be in countries like
>Germany where there is clearly a very real legal threat, or in places
>where the threat is less well-defined.  But the fear of what might
>happen would still keep the bulk of the potential participants away.
>
>I see no reason why we should treat these two solutions as mutually
>exclusive.
>
>
>HTTP is not XOR with HTTPS.  Some sites will support one or the other
>but not both, but most sites either allow both or already use some
>mixture of both.
>
>Yes, this can complicate things in the context of serving web sites,
>but I don't think that necessarily has to be a problem for us.  There
>are additional design considerations that need to be taken into
>account, but I think we can handle that.
>
>
>I should be able to provide a free entry point for
>vpn-required.openwireless.org and anyone who wants to connect to that
>network using a VPN-enabled client should be able to do so.  But if you
>don't have a VPN-enabled client, you would not be able to use my
>network connection.
>
>If my neighbor wants to provide a free entry point for
>unencrypted.openwireless.org and take some extra risk (perhaps minimal,
>or maybe real), then they should be able to do that, too.
>
>--
>Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
>LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
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